Members

Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics
School of Medicine

Dr. Ai's lab is engineering fluorescent proteins, luciferases, and unnatural-amino-acid-containing proteins and viruses for imaging, diagnostics, and therapeutics. In addition to protein and viral engineering, we use a collection of innovative techniques, such as fluorescence microscopy, bioluminescence imaging, synthetic chemistry, and electrophysiology, to dissect signaling pathways involving redox-active molecules, chemical transmitters, and protein post-translational modifications (PTMs). In particular, we take advantage of reactive oxygen species and oxidation-induced PTMs to tackle pathogens, either directly or by breaking immune tolerance.

https://med.virginia.edu/ai-lab/

Larry Band is the Ernest Ern Professor of Environmental Science and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia. Until 2017 he was the Voit Gilmore Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Band’s research is on watershed ecohydrology, including coupled water, carbon and nutrient cycling, co-evolution of forest ecological and hydrological systems, and human/environment interactions, including water/health issues.  Band is an AGU and GSA Fellow. In 2014 Band was the GSA Birdsall-Dreiss Distinguished Lecturer, with talks on hydroclimate and groundwater mediated evolution of forest patterns, and the ecohydrology of urban green infrastructure. He was the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. Board Chair in 2010. Band has been PI or co-PI on more than $30M of grants and contracts from municipal, state, federal and international agencies and foundations.  Band has published  >150 papers, book chapters and technical reports and has consulted with federal, state and municipal agencies in the US and Canada on watershed protection, forest health, stormwater and ecosystem restoration. 

Christopher L. Barrett is Professor and Executive Director of the Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative at the University of Virginia. He is an interdisciplinary computational scientist who has published more than 100 research articles exploring all aspects of large multiscale interaction systems. Over the past 35 years, Barrett has conceived, founded and led large interdisciplinary complex systems research projects and organizations, established national and international technology programs, and co-founded organizations for federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security. He has served in various advisory and collaborative scientific roles internationally.

Barrett is the recipient of the 2012–2013 Jubilee Professorship in Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University in Sweden and is a member of the 2010 Royal Colloquium for the King of Sweden. He was a distinguished international professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (1997–1998). He has received Distinguished Research, Service, Advisory and Security Awards from the U.S. Navy, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Alliance for Transportation Research, as well as the Commonwealth of Virginia and European Commission. He holds seven patents and has nine pending.

ChrisBarrett@virginia.edu

https://engineering.virginia.edu/faculty/christopher-l-barrett

Samuel C. Bodily is the John Tyler Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School. His publications relate to decision and risk analysis, multiattribute utility, forecasting, strategy modeling, revenue management, and eStrategy. For the Institute of Global Infectious Diseases, his expertise can be applied to collaborations with those creating interventions in responding to an epidemic or outbreak, to help evaluate and weigh interventional options, and to make the development and disbursal of new therapeutics against global infectious diseases more palatable to manufacturers, government agencies, and NGOs. He has published textbooks and more than forty articles in top journals in the field. 

Philip E. Bourne, PhD, FACMI is the Stephenson Chair of Data Science, Director of the Data Science Institute and a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. Prior to that he was the Associate Director for Data Science (ADDS; aka Chief Data Scientist) for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). In his role as ADDS he led the trans NIH US $110M per year Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) research initiative and contributed to data policies and infrastructure aimed at accelerating biomedical discovery. Examples include: establishing the NIH Commons, support for data and software citation and establishing preprints as a supported form of research. Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Bourne was Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances in the Office of Research Affairs and a Professor in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Dr. Bourne is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and an inductee of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He has published over 350 papers and 5 books and co-founded 4 companies. Awards include the Jim Gray Award eScience Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award. His current research focuses on systems pharmacology (notably neglected tropical diseases and protein kinase targets), structural bioinformatics, scholarly communication, professional development and the development and application of data science methods.

Catherine Bradshaw is a Professor and the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia (U.Va.). Prior to her current appointment at Suva, she was an Associate Professor and the Associate Chair of the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds a doctorate in developmental psychology from Cornell University and a master’s of education in counseling and guidance from the University of Georgia. She is the editor of Prevention Science and formerly Associate Editor for the Journal of Research on Adolescence. She organizes Curry’s efforts in globally-themed research. Her primary research interests focus on youth development, bullying, and school-based prevention programs. Her expertise will benefit the ongoing and planned research in the Institute of Global Infectious Diseases on the effect of pediatric infectious diseases on child and adolescent health and development, and frame positive interventions in light of what works most effectively in this population.

Timothy Bullock is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology. Dr. Bullock’s lab has a long-standing history of defining the mechanisms by which cytotoxic cells of the immune system, known as CD8+ T cells, are activated and differentiates. This is done with the intent to leverage this knowledge to develop molecules that augment the efficacy of vaccines, particular therapeutic vaccines that depend upon effector T cell activity. This knowledge and expertise will fit with intent of the Institute of Global Infectious Diseases to develop and deploy interventions that will be rapidly available to acute outbreaks of infectious disease. Dr. Bullock has managed grants from federal and philanthropic sources, and has a robust relationship with various entities in the biotechnological industries.

James Casanova is a Professor in the Department of Cell Biology. Dr. Casanova has been studying the relationships between bacterial pathogens and their hosts for many years. Much of this work has been focused on the enteric pathogen Salmonella, and the mechanisms through which it infects and survives within host cells. Using a combination of in vitro (cell culture) and in vivo (animal) models, these studies have identified host processes that are actively manipulated by the bacterium for its own survival, and characterized them at the molecular level. The laboratory is also actively pursuing the mechanisms of bacterial recognition by the innate immune system, and how the innate immune response is generated in response to that recognition. As a cell biologist, Dr. Casanova will contribute his expertise in the host response to infectious disease at the cellular and molecular level.

Cristian Danna is an Assistant Professor who joined the Department of Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences in 2014. During his postdoctoral training at Harvard University, Dr. Danna acquired extensive experience in plant innate immunity, plant defense and the genetics and chemistry of plant-made small compounds with antimicrobial properties. The Danna lab studies the antimicrobial defense responses associated with the production of plant-made small compounds. Most of these small compounds are produced in large amounts only after the onset of defense. The Danna lab has assembled a large collection of mutants of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana in which the synthesis of some of these small compounds is compromised. The Danna lab uses this collection of mutants to screen for compounds that suppress the growth of human pathogenic bacterial and/or interfere with virulence mechanisms associated with bacterial pathogenesis in humans. The rational supporting the use of Arabidopsis mutants is based in the fact that organic extracts obtained from wild type plants have antimicrobial properties against Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an activity that is missing in the organic extracts of mutants in which the synthesis of a particular class of small compounds is compromised. This information is used to narrow down the final identification of small compounds with antimicrobial activity.

Zygmunt Derewenda is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics. Dr. Derewenda is a structural biologist with expertise in protein structure/function studies, with specific emphasis on high-resolution investigations using X-ray crystallography. Several of his projects have been focused on proteins derived from pathogenic bacteria and viruses, and contributed to either better understanding of molecular mechanisms of pathogenicity, or drug discovery efforts. The proteins that were studied include the Yersinia pestis V-antigen, an essential virulence factor in cholera, and the C-terminal domain of the nucleoprotein from the Ebola virus.

Rebecca Dillingham

I am Emeritus Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Virginia. I am a graduate of the School of Medicine at the University of Leiden (The Netherlands), and hold a PhD from the University of Maastricht (The Netherlands), based on research in inflammatory mediator signaling. I completed my residency in anesthesiology and a fellowship in molecular pharmacology at the University of Virginia, prior to joining the faculty there in 1994. For the next 6 years I directed an NIH-funded basic science research program, focused primarily on the effects of general and local anesthetics on receptor functioning. In 2000, I was recruited as Chair to the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands, where I continued my basic science research.

In 2004, I returned to the University of Virginia to focus on clinical research. Most of my initial studies tested the findings obtained through our basic science models in the clinical setting, with exploration of inflammatory modulating by local anesthetics as the primary area of interest. This naturally expanded into clinical research in other areas related to improvement in postoperative outcomes by perioperative interventions. In the global setting, this has translated into an interest in infection control postoperatively and in the ICU.

Although I retired from clinical work at the beginning of 2018, I am still actively involved in clinical research and mentorship, as well as in global health activities.

I have published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, as well as numerous book chapters. I have given close to 100 national and international lectures on both clinical and research topics. I have trained more than 20 postdoctoral research fellows and 7 PhD students. I have served on several American Society of Anesthesiologists committees and subcommittees, including the Committee on Research. I am a past member of the board of directors of the International Society for Anesthetic Pharmacology and the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation. I have been Associate Editor for the journal Anesthesiology, and Section Editor for Preclinical Pharmacology for Anesthesia and Analgesia. I have served on the editorial boards of Anesthesia and Analgesia (as Senior Editor), Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine, Best Practice and Research: Clinical Anaesthesiology, and still serve on the board of the Southern African Journal of Anaesthesia and Analgesia. I have served as ad-hoc reviewer for more than 50 other journals.

Edward H. Egelman is the Harrison Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. He has been widely recognized for his development of methods to determine the structure of helical polymers using electron microscopy. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and of the Biophysical Society, and has served as Editor-in-Chief of Biophysical Journal and as President of the Biophysical Society. A large part of his research involves studying bacterial polymers (adhesion and conjugation pili, flagellar filaments, Type VI Secretion System sheaths, Type III Secretion System needles and plasmid segregation filaments) that are essential for bacterial pathogenesis. He has played a leading role in the current revolution in cryo-EM where polymers that can never be crystallized can be solved at near-atomic resolution using microscopic methods.

Stephen Eubank is a Professor in the Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative and in the Department of Public Health Sciences. His research focuses on applying mathematical and computational formalisms for dynamical systems on socio-technical networks to health-related problems, e.g., the spread of infectious disease across mobility-driven human contact networks. As PI of a research grant in the NIGMS-funded MIDAS consortium, he has advocated for the use of large-scale simulations in planning responses to infectious disease outbreaks and advised both HHS and DoD on the response to the 2009 influenza pandemic and the West Africa Ebola outbreak. He is interested in incorporating a better understanding of the social and cognitive aspects of health-related behavior into simulations.

Mary Margaret Frank is an Associate Professor of Business Administration and Academic Director of the Institute for Business in Society at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Frank currently serves on the board of directors and as chairperson of the Audit Committee of the Female Health Company/Veru Healthcare (FHC). Professor Frank’s research, teaching and curriculum development involve the intersection of private, government and public sector engagement on societal issues in order to affect change. In order to best accomplish this broader objective, she has initiated a cross-disciplinary agenda at the University of Virginia including a seminar titled the National Debt, a course and pan-university student initiative to address HIV/AIDS, the creation of the P3 Impact Award to recognize outstanding global public-private partnerships, and the Tri-Sector Leadership Fellows program featuring business, law and public policy speakers and issues. These initiatives and her outstanding teaching, innovative curriculum design and leading research have led Frank and her students to receive accolades from leading political figures as well as numerous awards. She believes that solving society’s most complicated problems require talented people from a variety of backgrounds who want to work together for a common goal.

Brent A. French is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering with joint appointments in Radiology and Cardiovascular Medicine. He currently serves the University as a member of the IACUC and SOM as a member of the Promotion and Tenure Committee. In addition, Dr. French serves as Faculty Advisor to the Molecular Imaging Center Core facility administered by the SOM through the Office of Research Core Administration. Dr. French has a longstanding record of accomplishment in a number of fields ranging from ischemic heart disease to gene therapy to preclinical imaging. Each of these fields relate directly to the goals of the institute, given that the pro-inflammatory component of ischemic heart disease is aggravated by infection (particularly periodontitis), that gene therapy shows great promise against infectious disease, and that the longitudinal assessment of most any animal model of infectious disease can be enhanced by preclinical imaging. Among Dr. French’s many collaborations at UVA, the one that synergizes best with this Pan-University Initiative is his collaboration with Kevin Janes (BME) aimed at developing AAV9-mediated gene therapies to treat both the acute and chronic forms of coxsackievirus infection in children and young adults. Among Dr. French’s external collaborations, perhaps the most relevant is the collaboration with Dr. Jurgen Schrader at the University of Dusseldorf aimed at developing novel MRI methods for the early assessment of pneumonia. Other external collaborations of note include close ties (and recent publications) with the R&D arm of AstraZeneca located in Molndal, Sweden.

Kirsten Gelsdorf is the Director of Global Humanitarian Policy and senior lecturer at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Kirsten brings 19 years of experience working in the humanitarian sector; most recently serving as the Chief of the Policy Analysis and Innovation section at the United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Her career includes long-term field postings and operational deployments to numerous emergencies including the international responses where she helped coordinate responses to health crises. She also helped develop and promote the policies to link the response to HIV/AIDs, food insecurity, and poverty during the 6-country southern Africa crisis. She has led major policy processes and authored numerous high-profile policy reports documents that have been implemented by Member States and adopted in key UN resolutions. She has been the guest editor of Journal special editions and a Senior Researcher for Tufts University.

Globally an estimated one million children in low and middle-income countries die before their fifth birthday from enteric infections that result in diarrhea. The virulence of the major causes of diarrheal illness in these settings, the protozoan parasites Entamoeba and Cryptosporidium, is highly variable. My hypothesis is that both parasite genetics and host environment factors control the virulent phenotype and my current focus is on the use of molecular methods to identify the approaches that would be most effective in preventing disease.

Don Griffin is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering with a secondary appointment in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Virginia. He received a Bachelors of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering from University of California, Davis in 2006. He earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011. Dr. Griffin develops biomaterial platforms for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine that combine unique material chemistries, microscale geometries, and novel therapeutic delivery approaches. His research focuses on understanding how acellular scaffolds can control host tissue response and how material-tissue interactions can adapt over time towards equilibrium, including both resorbable and permanent material settings. His macroporous, injectable scaffolds employ both immobilized bioactive components to control surface-cell signaling and soluble signal gradients to control (and promote) tissue integration within the scaffold interior. His research spans basic science discovery to the design of new material therapies. In addition, Dr. Griffin founded a biomaterials-focused start-up company that is growing in San Diego, CA and commercializing the material platform he invented during his postdoctoral research. At UVA, his specific areas of interest include cutaneous wound healing and infection management, vocal tissue rehabilitation, articular cartilage regeneration, and volumetric muscle loss recovery. Dr. Griffin is a past recipient of the American Chemical Society’s Excellence in Graduate Polymer Research Award and an NIH F32 Postdoctoral Fellow.

Richard L. Guerrant, Thomas H. Hunter Professor of International Medicine, is Founding Director of the Center for Global Health at UVA, one of the first trans-University Centers for Global Health in the country in 2001, having chaired the Division of Geographic Medicine from 1979 before that.  His longstanding research interest is in enteric infectious diseases. Dr. Guerrant has lived and worked in the Congo, Bangladesh and Brazil. Guerrant edits the major textbook on Tropical Infectious Diseases, among 5 other books, and is author of over 600 original scientific papers, major textbook chapters and reviews, including some 18 coauthored scientific publications with UVA’s 3 Nobel laureates, Gilman, Murad and Marshall. His work is focused on the recognition, diagnosis, pathogenesis, impact and treatment of enteric infections. With colleagues in Brazil, Guerrant’s research documents the effects of and potential solutions for diarrhea and enteric parasitic infections on the long-term physical and cognitive development in malnourished children. He is past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and recipient of its Walter Reed Medal, recipient of the Mentor Award of IDSA (2009), the University’s Distinguished Scientist Award (2009) and its highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award in 2010, was named Outstanding Scientist of Virginia in 2012 and was honored by the NFID with the Maxwell Finland Award in 2014. Elected to the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, Guerrant chaired its Board on Global Health (2007-2013) and currently serves on its Forum on Public-Private Partnerships for Global Health and Safety.

Jennifer Guler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. The Guler lab studies the human infective malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. Dr. Guler has a strong background in molecular and biochemical parasitology from her training in some of the premier parasitology labs in the country. The Guler Malaria Lab broadly investigates the mechanisms of antimalarial resistance; they use a variety of innovative tools to understand both genetic and metabolic adaptation by the parasite. This work is highly collaborative, involving partnerships that span the UVa grounds (Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the Division of Infectious Disease) and beyond (Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda). The lab attracts students from across grounds, generating a vibrant mix of biology, biomedical engineering, and biomedical science backgrounds.

Marie-Louise Hammarskjöld is the Charles H. Ross Professor and Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology. She is also the Associate Director of the Myles H. Center for AIDS and Human Retroviruses. She has been working on HIV for more than 30 years, especially in the area of molecular genetics of HIV and host cell interactions. Her work has been continuously funded by NIH and she has made many original contributions to the field and mentored many graduate and post-graduate students. For many years, she was Chair of the UVA Institutional Biosafety Committee and she is now a member of National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity (NSABB) that advises the federal government on regulation of infectious disease research. During her many years in virology, she has also worked and published on other viruses of global importance, such as EBV and HTLV. Since 2009, she has been involved in a partnership with University of Venda (UNIVEN) in Limpopo, South Africa. This includes collaborative HIV research with the group of Professor Pascal Bessong (a former postdoctoral trainee in the Thaler Center), as well as substantial educational efforts that are aimed at building human capital and research capacity at this historically disadvantaged university. This program is currently funded by a grant from the South African Department of Science & Technology and supports the teaching of a yearly hands-on 2 week workshop for about 30 students at UNIVEN, as well as participation of 2-4 UNIVEN students in the Summer Research Internship Program in the UVA Medical School. In addition, the Thaler Center hosts graduate students from UNIVEN for 12-18 month periods for mentoring and research on joint collaborative projects. In addition to this, Dr. Hammarskjöld is involved in outreach programs with high school students in the Limpopo region. This has included a Jefferson Public Citizen project in 2013, where a team of UVA undergraduates implemented a Molecular Biology/Genetics program at the Vuwani Center, a UNIVEN led outreach center for high school science education.

Tajie Harris is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience. Dr. Harris’ research focuses on how the immune system detects and controls parasitic pathogens that infect the central nervous system, with a focus on Toxoplasma gondii. Her research group uses multiphoton microscopy and other approaches to visualize host-pathogen interactions in the brains of living animals. In 2013, Dr. Harris was recruited to the Department of Neuroscience and the center for Brain Immunology and Glia, a group of investigators from across Grounds that studies the interface between the immune and nervous systems. Dr. Harris is currently performing interdisciplinary research to understand how protective immune responses are coordinated within the brain. Dr. Harris is a member of the Carter Immunology Center and numerous training programs including the Neuroscience Graduate Program, Immunology Training Grant, Infectious Disease Training Grant, Medical Scientist Training Program, and Biotechnology Training Program. Dr. Harris’ research is currently supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Frederick Hayden is the Stuart S Richardson Professor Emeritus of Clinical Virology and Professor Emeritus of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health. Since joining the faculty in 1978 he has undertaken extensive clinical and laboratory-based research studies in therapeutics and vaccines for influenza and other respiratory viral infections. He continues to serve as consultant to multiple pharmaceutical and biotech companies on these topics. In recent years Dr. Hayden has become involved increasingly in international public health activities. During 2006-2008 he served as a medical officer in the Global Influenza Programme at the World Health Organization, Geneva and during 2008-2012 as influenza research coordinator within International Activities at the Wellcome Trust, London. Dr. Hayden chaired the writing committees for two WHO clinical consultations on avian H5N1 and one on pandemic 2009 H1N1 influenza and continues to serve as a consultant to WHO on emerging viral infections including avian H7N9 influenza and continues to serve as a consultant to WHO on emerging viral infections including avian H7N9 influenza, MERS-CoV, and Ebola. In 2012-13 he worked with WHO colleagues to develop a new initiative, the Battle against Respiratory Viruses (BRAVE), to foster research on this important public health problem. During his work at the Wellcome Trust he also helped to establish a new federation of clinical research networks called the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) to improve the clinical research response to respiratory and other emerging infectious disease threats. ISARIC encompasses over 40 academic clinical research networks from 6 continents and has its Coordinating Center at Oxford University. After leaving the Trust he served as the interim chair of ISARIC and remains a member of its Executive Board. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and reviews, and co-edits the textbook Clinical Virology, the fourth edition will be published by the American Society for Microbiology later this year.

Brian Helmke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Helmke worked studies the fundamental mechanisms of force generation in the glideosomes of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. His research strategy uses a laser trap transducer to position a microsphere in contact with immobilized parasites and their surface exposed adhesion proteins. Motion of the microsphere within the trap reflects the activity of the actin-myosin complex (and any other force generating components) in the glideosome. His laboratory has exposed a number of exciting features of the glideosome. First and foremost, the glideosome is not intrinsically polar in its force generation; rather, force generation becomes aligned to the long axis of the cell approximately one minute after receptor ligation. They have also shown the reliance of this apparatus on dynamic actin filaments, cytoplasmic calcium, and a lysine methyltransferase identified by Dr. Ke Hu at Indiana University. An important aspect of the research is to identify phenotypic physical behaviors of T. gondii that are associated with actomyosin-based motility and host cell invasion. In particular, cell motility and shape change are being investigated as primary determinants of the ability to invade host tissue. His lab specializes in cellular mechanobiology, with an emphasis on cell mechanics, cell motility, and signaling. Their core technical expertise is in areas of quantitative live-cell microscopy and image analysis.

Eric Houpt is the Jack Gwaltney Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Virginia and is Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine. He and his group lead studies on the burden of infectious diseases, drug resistance, and emerging infections all over the world. He previously trained at Emory and the University of Chicago, and has worked as a physician and researcher in Papua New Guinea and at the Kilimanjaro Medical Centre in Tanzania. He was awarded the Bailey Ashford Medal by the American Society of Tropical Medicine, the Oswald Award for Mid-Career Achievement by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He is a member of the CDC Advisory Council for the Elimination of Tuberculosis and has been the tuberculosis consultant for the Virginia Department of Health since 2009.

Ku-Lung (Ken) Hsu is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology. Dr. Hsu’s research program is focused on developing chemical methods and probes to study the enzymatic, metabolic, and cellular mechanisms underlying immune function in mammalian physiology and disease. His long-term goal is to discover new lipid pathways that can be pharmacologically targeted for boosting host immune responses to infectious diseases and cancer and for treating chronic inflammation. To achieve these goals, Dr. Hsu’s group aims to bridge state-of-the-art chemical biology and quantitative mass spectrometry to enable enzyme, inhibitor, and metabolic pathway discovery in vivo.

Donald Hunt is the University Professor of Chemistry and Pathology. He has received numerous accolades including three distinguished awards from the American Chemical Society, The Thompson Medal, and Protein Society's Christian B. Anfinsen Award. In 2014, he was inducted into the America Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Hunt pioneered efforts to develop methods and instrumentation that set the standard for ultrasensitive detection and characterization of proteins and peptides by mass spectrometry. These contributions continue to underpin the whole field of proteomics and have had a dramatic impact on research in immunology, cell signaling, cell migration, epigenetics and cancer. The ability to characterize complex mixtures of proteins, antibody structures, or MHC peptides during infections is essential to many future research collaborations in the Institute.

Kevin Janes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Janes’ expertise lies in experimental and computational approaches for dissecting the systems biology of host-cell responses. Of his many research foci, the one most relevant to the institute is investigation of the cellular signaling that is rewired in cardiac cells following infection by coxsackie B3 virus. Dr. Janes has been recognized as a Pew Scholar, a Packard Fellow, a Kavli Fellow, and recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. He is currently a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science Signaling.

Dean Kedes is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology. Dr. Kedes is a physician-scientist with subspecialty clinical training in infectious diseases. His basic research program focuses on the human oncogenic pathogen, Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV/HHV8). KSHV is the pathogen underlying the most common AIDS-associated malignancy worldwide, Kaposi’s saroma KS) as well as two other B cell lymphoma-like diseases. KS is a global health concern, ranking as the single most common cancer in a number of African nations. Dr. Kedes’ ongoing research program ranges from very basic work, including the determination of the function of individual KSHV encoded proteins and the use of super resolution microscopy (in collaboration with UVA investigator, M. Mitchell Smith) to elucidate the supra structure of the tether linking the viral genome to the human chromatin during latent infection. In addition, his research interests include projects aimed at characterizing primary infection of human tissue with KSHV and the identification of novel potential therapeutics. Over the last 16 years, the Kedes laboratory has pursued basic, translational and applied research projects and has made significant contributions to the field of KSHV biology and pathogenesis. Dr. Kedes is the Director of the University’s Medical Scientist Program, with an average enrollment of over 50 MD/PhD students and requiring the participation and coordination of over 150 faculty members and various members of the University’s upper and middle administration.

Kimberly Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. The Kelly Laboratory is interested in analyzing how the various biological scales such as molecules, proteins, cells, and structures interact in both normal and abnormal states. They utilize a multidisciplinary approach with expertise in chemical biology, physiology, proteomics, molecular imaging, and nanotechnology to make fundamental discoveries that are linked to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. The Kelly laboratory has been genetically engineering viruses to produce novel nanomaterials, identify pathogenic viruses, diagnose and treat cancer, and develop a method to identify drug resistant mycobacterium tuberculosis. In addition, Dr. Kelly teaches an undergraduate course entitled Nanomedicine (BME 4890), which incorporates focuses of the Institute, specifically therapeutic design and vaccines.

Mark Kester is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Co-director of the NanoSTAR Institute. His laboratory has evaluated nanoliposomes, nanodendrimers and nanocolloids as effective drug delivery vehicles for pharmacological and molecular agents. Relevant to the proposed Institute of Global Infectious Disease, his laboratory focuses on the relationship between sphingolipids and human viruses. By altering the sphingolipid composition of a host cell, viral infectivity is often reduced or eliminated altogether. Dr. Kester has begun to study the mechanistic relationship between influenza virus and the sphingolipid composition of human cells. Preliminary data indicate that specific sphingolipids may serve as promising targets to halting the viral infection. Their goal is to formulate a sphingolipid based nanoliposome that works synergistically with current anti-flu medications, such as Tamiflu.

Glynis Kolling is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, Department of Medicine, and is also a member of the Center for Global Health, the Institutional Biosafety Committee, and the UVA Fecal Microbiota Transplant Program. As part of the Center for Global Health, she has helped to mentor trainees from Brazil and Africa on projects related to enteric infections. She has extensive expertise in microbiology, bacterial pathogenesis (i.e., enterohemorrhagic E. coli, enteroaggregative E. coli, and Clostridium difficile), microbial communities, and applying host systems for understanding the host-microbial interface. Dr. Kolling maintains trans-disciplinary and cross-Grounds collaborations with academic and clinical faculty in Biomedical Engineering, Biology, Geriatrics, and Gastroenterology.

Department of Economics

College of Arts & Sciences

Anton Korinek is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, Department of Economics and Darden School of Business as well as a Research Associate at the NBER, a Research Fellow at the CEPR and a Research Affiliate at the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute Centre for the Governance of AI. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2007 and has also worked at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Maryland. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, the World Bank, the IMF, the BIS and numerous central banks.

His areas of expertise include macroeconomics, international finance, and inequality, with special focus on the effects of artificial intelligence. His most recent research investigates how to weigh economic and epidemiological concerns in responding to COVID-19 - in short, there is no trade-off between lives and livelihoods because people need to feel safe to start spending again. He also shows that there are significant externalities from individual behavior that call for public health interventions. In other work, Korinek analyzes the externalities that give rise to antimicrobial resistance - for example, feeding antimicrobials to livestock imposes costs on society by fostering the growth of resistant bacteria.

www.korinek.com

Gerard P. Learmonth Sr. is Research Professor in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is the founding director of the Center for Leadership Simulation and Gaming and the Center for Large-Scale Computational Modeling, a Data Science Institute Center of Excellence. His work involves the modeling and simulation of large, global environmental, economic, and social challenges. These comprehensive, data-driven simulation models may be linked with role-playing interfaces to create serious games for learning. His current effort is the design and development of a Global Food Security Game. In conjunction with the UVA Center for Global Health, Dr. Learmonth conducted in-country research on the effects of poor water quality on the growth and development of children in Limpopo Province, South Africa. The research involved a mobile phone-based census of several villages in Limpopo and the subsequent development of a simulation model used to test the efficacy of proposed water quality interventions using a virtual population developed from the census data. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences in the School of Medicine and a courtesy appoint in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

https://engineering.virginia.edu/faculty/rachel-letteri 

Jundong Li is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia with appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Computer Science, and School of Data Science. His research interests span several areas, including data mining, machine learning, social media mining, and artificial intelligence. In particular, He is interested in developing innovative learning algorithms to glean actionable patterns from big, noisy, dynamic, heterogeneous, and networked data to address the pressing challenges in various high-impact domains, including social media, bioinformatics, environmental/computational health, online education, and industrial manufacturing. Currently, his team is focusing on knowledge-guided causal inference frameworks and corresponding theoretical understandings to analyze observational data to improve the existing data-driven decision-making process.

For more information about their research, please visit:

http://people.virginia.edu/~jl6qk/

Jennie Ma is a Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences and Department of Medicine at the University of Virginia. Trained in biostatistics and health informatics, Dr. Ma has engaged to biostatistical research in clinical and translational applications for more than 20 years. Her research interests focus on clinical outcomes research, survival analysis, longitudinal data analysis, clinical trials, and genetic epidemiology. She has served as PI or co-Investigator for various projects, and collaborated with numerous basic researchers and clinical investigators in a wide range of clinical applications with cutting-edge statistical methods, including nephrology, infectious diseases, cardiology, oncology, anesthesiology, diabetes and endocrinology, and drug addictions. She has provided sustaining biostatistical support in every stage of the clinical and translational research, such as study conception and design, data acquisition, decision of appropriate analytical methods, analysis and interpretation of data, and scientific reporting. She has served on a T32 training grant in Department of Medicine at the University of Virginia and mentored/co-mentored many graduate students, postdocs, residents and medical fellows, as well as junior faculties in quantitative clinical/biomedical research. In this proposed institute, she will work with the investigators in the unified Global Infectious Diseases community and contribute her biostatistical expertise to the research and training activities.

Madhav Marathe is a Division Director of the Computing, Simulations and Network Science Division at the Biocomplexity Institute and a Professor of Computer Science. From January 2005-September 2018, he was a Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. Concurrently, at Virginia Tech, he was the Deputy Director (2005-2014) and then the Director (2014-2018) of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree in 1989 in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and his Ph.D. in 1994 in Computer Science from the University at Albany -SUNY, under the supervision of Professors Harry B. Hunt III and Richard E. Stearns. Before coming to Virginia Tech in 2005, he worked in the Basic and Applied Simulation Science group (CCS-5) in the Computer and Computational Sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was team leader in a theory-based, advanced simulation program to represent, design, and analyze extremely large socio-technical and critical infrastructure systems.  He holds adjunct appointments at the Chalmers University and  the Indian Institute of Public Health. https://engineering.virginia.edu/faculty/madhav-marathe

Amy Mathers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. The urgent clinical problem of increasing carbapenem resistance in Enterobacteriaceae threatens the health of vulnerable patients around the world. The Mathers laboratory has been evaluating detection methods in clinical microbiology, nosocomial transmission dynamics and molecular transfer of carbapenemase genes in the hospital for the last eight years. Following a sabbatical at Oxford University, ongoing collaboration efforts have focused applying whole genome sequencing approach to disentangling horizontal gene transfer in nosocomial settings. Dr. Mathers has funded effort through formal collaboration with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention evaluating the role of the hospital environment on contributing to acquisition of drug resistant gram negative bacteria in a simulated laboratory setting. She has been acting as a consultant to Public Health England for similar efforts. She has also written and received grants for cross campus collaboration with an active Coulter award software development for modeling hospital transmission of carbapenemase genes from the environment to patients. For this research Dr. Mathers collaborates with colleagues in Biomedical Engineering (Will Guilford and Jason Papin) and Systems Engineering (Laura Barnes), as well as other cross-Grounds collaborations.

Kathleen A. McManus is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, Department of Medicine. Dr. McManus’s research involves studying the impact of health policies on people living with HIV with the goal of helping to determine which health policies will help the United States end the HIV epidemic. She is passionate about evidence-informed health policy and strives to add to our knowledge in that area. Her work is at the intersection of big data, health outcomes, health services, health policy, and epidemiology. She has been awarded a K08 Mentored Career Development Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases study the effects of the Affordable Care Act on low-income people living with HIV and to quantify how health policy changes impact disparities in HIV care for African American people living with HIV. She has worked with undergraduate students, medical students, public policy and public health masters-level students, internal medicine residents, and infectious diseases fellow physicians on research projects and international electives.

Daniel Mietchen is a Senior Researcher at the Data Science Institute. Trained as a biophysicist, his research interests are mostly methodological in nature and span across biological scales in space and time, from viral replication to elephant vocalizations and sustainable development, from paleopathology to developmental disorders and music perception. The common denominator of these activities is data, and his focus is on how data and the associated workflows, infrastructures, standards and policies can be shared at scale with humans and machines throughout the research cycle as well as in humanitarian and educational contexts and for posterity. In particular, he is looking into mechanisms by which data arising from a given line of research or metadata about the associated ethical review processes can be made FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and provided as Linked Open Data.

Emma Mitchell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing, and Director of the CNL/MSN Program, as well as the Assistant Director for Graduate Global Initiatives. Dr. Mitchell’s program of research centers on: global health disparities; women’s health; and the prevention, screening, and early detection of Human Papillomavirus-related cervical cancer in under- and never-screened women. She has pilot projects in rural far Southwest Virginia exploring innovative technology and delivery models aimed at increasing access to cervical cancer screening, and has led student research and educational initiatives in Nicaragua since 2008.

Sean R. Moore is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Director of Research for the Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology. Dr. Moore returns to the University of Virginia following 7 years on faculty at the University of Cincinnati, where he served as Associate Director for the Global Research Office at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, the largest pediatric research facility in the nation. The long-term goals of Dr. Moore's research are to uncover underlying mechanisms of child undernutrition and enteric infections in developing countries and improve therapies to break their vicious cycle. Current global projects include: 1) IMAGINE, a collaboration with Dr. Aldo Lima of the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil to define the dosing, efficacy, and mechanisms of a glutamine-based therapy for undernutrition in at risk children and 2) SEEM a collaboration with Dr. Asad Ali at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan to define the etiologies and histopathology of environmental enteropathy among a birth cohort in Matiari, Pakistan. In complementary work, Dr. Moore's laboratory is developing murine models of environmental enteropathy and human intestinal organoid models of host-microbe interactions.

Noah Myung is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Center for Leadership Simulation and Gaming in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. His research interests include game theory, organizational economics, and financial economics, often utilizing tools from experimental economics and behavioral economics. His Department of Defense research interests include market design, focusing on issues in retention, compensation, and assignment. Dr. Myung is coordinating the creation of the Pandemic Student Simulation Competition in conjunction with the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA), Spring 2018.

Amanda Nguyen is an Assistant Professor in the Curry School of Education with a public health background and expertise in global mental health. Her research takes a partnership-based approach to improve the health and wellbeing of young people growing up in low-resource settings, leveraging both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine risk and protective factors, identify and describe psychosocial problems, validate assessment instruments, and evaluate interventions.  With a primary focus on mental health, Amanda’s work intersects with infectious disease research through considerations of how poor mental health may increase risk of physical health problems due to impaired functioning, as well as how physical health problems may negatively impact mental health and wellbeing.  She is also interested in how various health and mental health problems may be perceived differently across cultures and contexts, with implications for accurate assessment.  Recent work has included examining patterns of post-natal distress symptoms in Ethiopia, India, and Vietnam, understanding maternal perspectives on mental health priorities and help-seeking behaviors in Uganda, and exploring the impacts of peer victimization cross-culturally.  Amanda is currently collaborating on multiple research initiatives including scientific evaluation of psychosocial programs in humanitarian settings, accurate assessment of depression in areas with high physical comorbidities, risk and resiliency among conflict affected youth, and interventions to prevent behavior problems among indicated youth.

Lisa Colosi Peterson is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research pertains to the water-energy nexus, whereby water is required to produce energy, and energy is required to produce water. We seek to develop novel treatment technologies that deliver superior water quality without excessive energy consumption. We are particularly interested in the removal of prescription antibiotics and other antimicrobial agents from treated domestic sewage, with an ultimate goal of slowing the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria (ARB). Municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are key points of entry for antibiotics into the environment, and chronic exposure of downstream microbial populations contributes to the rise of ARB. We have previously demonstrated the capacity of freshwater algae to remove problematic trace organic contaminants (e.g., estrogens and other hormones) from treated WWTP discharges and shown that the treatment can be made net-energy generating, via digestion of the harvested algae biomass to produce methane-derived bio-electricity. We are now evaluating the capacity of this system to remove potent prescription antibiotics (e.g., ciprofloxacin [CIP] and amoxicillin). Initial results are promising; e.g., 93% CIPRO removal in 145 hours, with concomitant reduction in acute antibiotic potency in assays using E. coli. Observed removal is attributed to photo-degradation and bio-degradation. Ongoing and future work will focus on characterizing drug metabolites and assessing the potency of treated wastewaters to stimulate rise of ARB during chronic exposure to model organisms and WWTP-relevant microbial communities. Involvement with the Global Infectious Diseases Institute will allow us the opportunity for collaboration with groups working in complementary research areas as well as enhancing access to resources between labs that may help to further this research.

James Platts-Mills is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, Department of Medicine. Dr. Platts-Mills’ research focuses on the application of novel quantitative molecular diagnostics for enteropathogens to the epidemiology of enteric diseases in children in developing countries, including 1) revising estimates of pathogen-specific burdens diarrhea; 2) estimating associations between enteropathogen infections, in particular Campylobacter, on long-term growth and development outcomes in children; 3) describing the shifting etiology of diarrhea in settings where rotavirus vaccine has been introduced. This work is done with international collaborators in several countries in African and Asia, including Tanzania, Kenya, The Gambia, Mali, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Dr. Platts-Mills’ role in particular is to develop and deploy analytic approaches in collaboration with Dr. Eric Houpt for developing diagnostics for enteropathogens. They are also expanding their laboratory scope to include next generation sequencing-based diagnostics, for which they have begun collaboration with the Bioinformatics group.

Owen Pornillos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics. Dr. Pornillos’ group uses structural biology and biochemistry to study HIV structure and morphogenesis. Two key contributions in this area are structures of the mature HIV capsid, and soon-to-be-published structure of the immature capsid lattice. This work allowed them to define the molecular details of the boundary conditions of HIV maturation, which is a critical step in the viral life cycle and a proven target of anti-HIV/AIDS therapeutics. This is an important step towards the long-term goal of making a “movie” that describes the molecular transformations that drive HIV maturation. Ongoing work explores the mechanism of action of inhibitors, one currently in phase IIb clinical trials, which bind to the immature lattice and prevent the onset of maturation. Another broad area of interest includes the mechanisms by which so-called “pattern recognition receptors” identify and neutralize viral pathogens. Dr. Pornillos has recently defined how a receptor called TRIM5alpha recognizes and disables the incoming capsid of HIV. They are also studying regulatory mechanisms of the RIG-I pathway, which defends the cell against clinically important human pathogens such as influenza virus and dengue virus. This work will therefore contribute to and benefit from the Institute’s goal of enabling trans-disciplinary basic research on globally important infectious diseases.

Girija Ramakrishnan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Ramakrishnan’s interest at the bench is in the molecular mechanisms of bacterial pathogenesis with special regard to nutrient acquisition in the host environment. A major focus of her research is the bacterium Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia or rabbit fever. A more recent research interest is Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis. Dr. Ramakrishnan seeks to understand the role played by the essential nutrient iron in the infection biology of pathogen and host. She is currently working towards establishing a collaborative study with researchers in The Gambia on the closely related organism Mycobacterium africanum. Dr. Ramakrishnan is involved in an international study aimed at understanding environmental enteropathy and susceptibility to infection in Bangladesh and Pakistan populations; investigating if a metabolomics-based approach can be used to evaluate nutritional status and inflammation in young children.

https://uvahealth.com/findadoctor/profile/p-preston-reynolds 

Elizabeth Rogawski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health. She received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a focus in infectious disease epidemiology and international health. Her research interests are in pediatric enteric disease, and specifically, on the complex interactions between early childhood diarrhea, enteropathogen infections, environmental enteropathy, antibiotic use, and their effects on child health and development. The majority of her fieldwork has been based in South Africa and India. As a faculty fellow in the Center for Global Health, she works with a multidisciplinary team of collaborators and students to study the effectiveness of a point-of-use water treatment technology to prevent child stunting in rural South Africa. She is also interested in developing novel causal inference-based methods to generate epidemiologic evidence that is relevant to public health interventions and policy in the field of global infectious diseases.

Melanie Rutkowski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology. Dr. Rutkowski’s primary research interest is to understand how disruption of commensal homeostasis, or commensal dysbiosis, influences systemic immune function. Age, diet, chronic use of antibiotics, or systemic inflammation due to infection can alter the composition and function of the commensal ecosystem. This can significantly impact the function of the innate and adaptive arms of the immune system. The Rutkowski lab is characterizing how acute changes to commensal equilibrium influence myeloid homeostasis and function, tissue fibrosis, and adaptive immune function in healthy and diseased conditions. The laboratory is also interested in characterizing disease susceptibilities and immune function in individuals that lack the ability to sense microbial products through TLR5, an innate signaling receptor. Approximately 7.5% of individuals harbor a polymorphism in TLR5, reducing the ability to signal through this receptor almost completely. Although this polymorphism is compatible with a healthy lifestyle, we have previously shown that individuals lacking TLR5 have differing susceptibilities to breast and ovarian cancer, compared to individuals with functional TLR5. However, there remains unknown disease etiologies associated with the absence of TLR5. It is the goal of the laboratory to understand how innate cells, primarily dendritic cells, that lack the ability to signal through this receptor develop and function in various pathological/inflammatory contexts.

China Scherz is a medical anthropologist who has been conducting ethnographic research in Uganda since 2007. She is especially interested in the impact of infectious diseases on children’s well-being and how infectious diseases outcomes are impacted by risky behaviors. Her first book Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda (University of Chicago Press, 2014) focused on the tensions between different approaches to caring for orphaned children, many of whom were orphaned by their parents’ deaths from HIV/AIDS. She is currently leading a collaborative ethnographic study of alcohol use and recovery in Uganda. While high levels of alcohol consumption have been of increasing interest to medical researchers seeking to better understand diseases including HIV, tuberculosis, cancer, and other diseases in Uganda and in sub-Saharan Africa, this study will provide the first extended analysis of contemporary modes of conceptualizing and addressing problem-drinking in an African context. In addition to her academic work, she also served as a project manager for an anti-retroviral adherence and directly observed therapy program for the Boston based PACT project of Partners In Health from 2002-2004.

Rathina Kumar Shanmuga Kani is a Research Associate in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. His research interest includes point-of-care diagnostics development, antimicrobial resistance, characterization of novel resistance genes, and molecular epidemiology. He has substantial experience in the development and evaluation of PCR- and isothermal amplification-based molecular diagnostics for antimicrobial-resistant infections at the point-of-care. He has developed PCR-dipstick detection tests for several antimicrobial-resistant pathogens including colistin- and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci. GeneFields CPE, one of the molecular diagnostics that he has developed for the rapid detection of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae is commercially available as a diagnostic kit in Japan. Currently, he is involved in the development of point-of-care diagnostic kits for viral infections but not limited to COVID-19. On the other hand, he studies the impact of bile acids on persister cells for recurrent C. difficile infection.

Lois Shepherd is the Peter A. Wallenborn, Jr. and Dolly F. Wallenborn Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia, where she directs the programs in law and medicine at the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities. She is also a Professor of Public Health Sciences and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. She is the co-author of a leading casebook, Bioethics and the Law (3rd ed. Wolters Kluwer), as well as the author of If That Ever Happens to Me: Making Life and Death Decisions After Terri Schiavo (2009) and numerous law review and medical journal articles on law and medicine, including reproductive medicine, disability, end-of-life decision-making, and research ethics.

Jim Smith is the Henry L. Kinnier Professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Smith’s research focuses on developing appropriate technologies to improve water quality for the global poor. Globally, over 3 billion people do not receive water at the level of service we experience here the USA. As a result, over 2 million children die annually from ingestion of waterborne pathogens and the associated gastrointestinal infections, dehydration, and malnutrition. Countless more children suffer from growth stunting and cognitive impairment. In the absence of centralized water treatment and distribution systems, the World Health Organization has suggested that the best opportunity is to develop technologies that treat water right before consumption (e.g. at the household or point-of-use level). However, this is a difficult design problem as the inventions must be technologically effective, socially acceptable, extremely inexpensive, and simple to use. However, success in developing these appropriate technologies will result in countless lives saved by reducing infections by waterborne pathogens throughout the developing world.

Nathan Swami is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Swami’s work on microfluidic diagnostic and co-culture systems for the control of infections is well matched to the proposed Institute of Global Infectious Disease. Current microbiological analysis approaches to detect infectious pathogens and identify therapies are focused on time-consuming and costly methods based on animal models or adhesion assays that reduce the number of experimental permutations that can be studied. His research group is focused on label-free microfluidic approaches for highly parallelized microbial manipulation, electroporation and analysis of microbes, with single-cell sensitivity. Specifically, Dr. Swami’s group utilizes the characteristic intracellular electrophysiology arising from the phenotypic differences between cells to identify subpopulations using single-cell impedance cytometry for enabling spatially localized microfluidic enrichment and biomarker analysis.

Lukas Tamm is the Harrison Distinguished Professor in Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics and the Director of the Center for Membrane and Cell Physiology. His lab studies virus entry into cells and bacterial antibiotic resistance using structural, biophysical, and cell biological approaches. Specifically, Dr. Tamm’s lab has solved the fusion peptide structures of the surface glycoproteins of influenza virus, HIV, and Ebola virus allowing them to uncover their involvement in viral entry into animal and human cells. The work opens opportunities to block viral infections at the level of cell entry of these membrane enveloped viruses. The lab has also solved the structures of 4 bacterial outer membrane porins, namely those of OmpA and OmpG from Escherichia coli and OprH and OprG from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. OmpA was one of the first two structures of larger membrane proteins that were ever solved by magnetic resonance spectroscopy by any research team world-wide. Its folding and function as an ion channel were extensively studied. OmpG is pursued as a target for biosensor development. The outer shell proteins OprH and OprG are studied to understand and overcome the notorious antibiotic resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa at the level of outer membrane transport of this serious human pathogen

Dr. Teachman’s laboratory, the Program for Anxiety, Cognition, and Treatment (PACT) Lab, investigates cognitive processes that contribute to the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders and other forms of emotion dysregulation. Her lab is especially interested in how we can change thinking styles to improve emotional functioning, and how technology can be used to increase access to services. In collaboration with the Barnes and Boukhechba lab in engineering, the PACT lab uses mobile sensing to better understand how anxiety and emotion dysregulation affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in daily life, and offers technology-delivered interventions to bring services to people when and where they need them most.

Teachman lab website

bat5x@virginia.edu

Tania A. Thomas is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health. Prior to joining UVA, she previously trained at Oregon Health and Sciences University and Yale University. Her research program involves the epidemiology and diagnosis of tuberculosis in endemic settings such as Tanzania, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines. Her current work focuses on host-immune responses to TB and leveraging them as diagnostic biomarkers for children and adults. She also conducts community-based contact investigation studies to increase the early detection of pediatric TB cases. Domestically, she serves as the state consultant for pediatric TB cases through the Virginia Department of Health.

https://med.virginia.edu/phs/2017/09/07/valdez-rupa-s-ph-d/ 

Srini Venkatramanan is a Research Scientist at the Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative, University of Virginia. He is affiliated with the Network Systems Science & Advanced Computing Division, and is responsible for developing, analyzing and optimizing computational models in the field of network epidemiology. His areas of interest include network science, stochastic modeling and big data analytics. He has used in-silico models of society based on synthetic populations and metapopulation models to study questions of interest in the infectious diseases community. Recent research includes modeling and forecasting emerging infectious disease outbreaks (e.g., Ebola, Zika), impact of human mobility on disease spread and resource allocation problems in the context of epidemic control (e.g., seasonal influenza vaccines).

Website: www.srinivv.com/research
Email: srini@virginia.edu

Cirle A. Warren is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health of the School of Medicine. As a physician scientist, her research focuses on the pathogenesis of and development of novel interventions for enteric infections. She has recently identified potential new treatments for Clostridium difficile infection, which is often worsened, not cured, when antibiotics are administered. Dr. Warren is investigating the mechanisms underlying the worse disease presentation in the elderly compared with younger individuals. She is involved in mentoring UVA undergraduates, medical students, residents, and fellows, providing laboratory, clinical or international research experience, as needed. She has also trained international research fellows from Brazil, the Philippines, Ghana, South Africa and Peru. She has collaborations with scientists, clinicians and developmental workers from private, academic or non-governmental institutions in Brazil, Costa Rica and the Philippines. She is currently involved in the development and promotion of Southeast Asian Studies at the University.

Andrew C. Wicks is the Ruffin Professor of Business Administration at Darden. He is director of the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, director of the doctoral program and academic advisor for the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics. Wicks also serves as an adjunct professor in the Religious Studies department and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at UVA. He will contribute expertise to the Institute in research areas including health care ethics, stakeholder responsibility, stakeholder theory, trust, total quality management, and ethics and entrepreneurship. He works with MBA students, executives and corporations in the United States and abroad. Wicks is actively working with Ethics-LX, an entrepreneurial venture, to create a series of web-based simulations that incorporate ethics into the functional areas of business. He has authored four books and over 30 journal articles, and he has received awards for both his research and teaching.

Michael D. Williams joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 2012, where he is an Associate Professor of Surgery and Director, Emergency General Surgery in the Department of Surgery and Director of the UVA Center for Health Policy, a joint program of the Batten School, the School of Medicine and the Department of Public Health Sciences. The Center for Health Policy provides comprehensive, apolitical analysis of current and proposed health policy for citizens and policymakers. He is also Lead Physician for Transitions Care for Well Virginia, UVA’s Accountable Care Organization. He has served as the Director of the UVA Summer Medical and Dental Education Program, which was established by a major grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The program aims to help under-represented minority students become more competitive candidates for medical school. Dr. Williams has held numerous leadership positions in both clinical and academic medicine, and has many peer-reviewed publications to his credit. He passionately believes in the importance of patient-centered innovation in the application and management of health systems. His over 20 years of experience in health care delivery and systems design has led him to the conclusion that Health Equity starts with efficient, cost-effective health system design and management. Dr. Williams has a strong interest and background in Population Health, and sees this as the greatest opportunity to achieve health equity, both in the United States and globally. He serves on the Board of Directors for Healthcare Global, LLC, a non-profit committed to improving communities through improving health globally.

https://engineering.virginia.edu/faculty/haifeng-xu

Mark Yeager is the Andrew P. Somlyo Distinguished Professor and Chair of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics. His research focuses on assembly mechanisms of pathogenic viruses. By the use of electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM), X-ray crystallography and molecular modeling, Mark Yeager and his colleagues have discovered key design principles for the assembly of major viral pathogens such as HIV-1, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, SARS and rotavirus. The application of “hybrid structural methods” is especially powerful for the examination of megadalton assemblies that are pleomorphic, as exemplified by his studies on HIV capsid assembly. Electron crystallography of engineered two-dimensional crystals of the HIV-1 capsid protein CA yielded the first subnanometer resolution map that showed the molecular design of the hexagonal lattice of the conical capsid. In addition, the cryoEM-based model enabled the engineering of disulfide bonds that stabilized the hexameric and pentameric CA building blocks of the capsid, so that high-resolution structures could be determined by X-ray crystallography. These results enabled the building of the first atomic model of the conical capsid that revealed the molecular basis for the continuously variable hexagonal lattice in the pleomorphic, conical capsid. Follow-on studies identified an interface in the lattice as a potential drug target and showed that the restriction factor TRIM5 assembled as a hexagonal lattice, which was templated by the CA lattice. Dr. Yeager has also investigated structures associated with pathogenesis of Neisseria, Pseudomonas, and cholera bacteria.

Steven Zeichner is the McLemore Birdsong Professor of Pediatrics, Head of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, and Director of the Pendleton Pediatric Infectious Disease Laboratory, School of Medicine. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology. A board certified pediatric infectious disease physician, Dr. Zeichner has conducted globally important clinical and basic research related to infectious diseases. In his clinical research, Dr. Zeichner participated in and was the principal investigator for phase 1 studies of new antiretroviral agents in children. He was the lead editor for the Textbook of Pediatric HIV Care and the Handbook of Pediatric HIV Care. In his basic research Dr. Zeichner conducted important research on the molecular genetics of HIV and herpesviruses, including Kaposi’s Sarcoma-associated Herpesvirus (KSHV). His current research projects involve developing innovative technologies to distinguish highly immunogenic from less immunogenic antigens, which would be useful for vaccine development, including prophylactic vaccines for infectious diseases and therapeutic cancer vaccines. Dr. Zeichner has projects that aim to develop new, low cost recombinant bacterial vaccines for HIV prophylaxis and therapeutic cancer vaccines that would be especially appropriate for low income country settings. He has active collaborations with investigators at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa, and the South Africa Medical Research Council to develop a therapeutic vaccine for Burkitt lymphoma (BL), which is linked to Epstein-Barr Virus and malaria infections in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Zeichner is also working with investigators at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) and the epidemiology unit of Médicins Sans Frontieres, Epicentre, based at MUST to define and improve BL diagnosis and therapeutics.

Jarrett Zigon is the William and Linda Porterfield Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences, and Director of the Bioethics Program. My research has primarily focused on questioning the moral and political assumptions of medical and therapeutic interventions in contexts of global infectious diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis C, in particular related to drug use. In these contexts I have addressed such issues as the unintended non-health related consequences of the discourses of rights and responsibility, and drug user political activism. In doing so, I have pursued my interests in the anthropology of moralities and ethics; political activity and theory; the intersection of anthropology and philosophy; and the drug war. These interests are taken up from the perspective of an anthropology strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian continental philosophy and critical theory, the theoretical articulation of which I name critical hermeneutics. My research projects in Russia have included ethnographically examining Russian Orthodox Church drug rehabilitation programs as spaces for moral training, and life-historical research on moral experience in times of post-Soviet social and political change. For the last decade, I have been conducting research with the globally networked anti-drug war movement, in an attempt to rethink some of our most closely held ethical and political assumptions and conceptualizations. Much of this research was funded by Dutch Science Foundation and European Research Council (ERC) grants to study the unintended consequences of using the language of rights and responsibility in HIV-intervention contexts. I have authored several books: Morality: An Anthropological Perspective (2008), Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Narratives of Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow (2010), and HIV is God’s Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia (2011). My latest book, Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding (2018), addresses the ethical, political and ontological grounds of the disappointment many feel today, offering an alternative vision of what a future could be and how to achieve it. A forthcoming book in 2019 entitled A War on People is an ethnographically-grounded theoretical exploration of the exclusionary violence of the drug war, and the political activity of active drug users fighting against this war and creating new, more human, ways of living together in communities of care.